From August 27–31, 2025, Berlin Atonal reoccupied the towering, cavernous Kraftwerk complex, transforming concrete and steel into a living organism of sound. Five nights unfolded like rituals: premieres that unsettled, commissions that interrogated, installations that demanded movement and attention, and late-night club sets that pulled bodies into vibration and release. In its 12th edition, the festival has become more than a platform—it is a stage for risk, a laboratory where art and sound collide, where perception is challenged, reshaped, and sometimes undone. Listening is not passive; it presses against the chest, folds into the body, insists on presence. Gathering is not neutral; it exposes hierarchies and forces negotiation between strangers and the environment. Sense-making becomes a collective labor, a negotiation between flesh, architecture, and pulse: experimental, exacting, corporeal. Entering Kraftwerk, a post-industrial cathedral, is an experience that inevitably brings the past to mind. The history of the festival begins in 1982 at SO36 in Kreuzberg, inevitably coinciding with a series of cultural and political events that would culminate in the fall of the Wall and another radical transformation of the city and its spaces. In 1990 came the last original edition of the festival: the experimentation of sonic avant-gardes had by then paved the way for other genres, making room for people’s need to come together, dance, and imagine a different and freer future. The West Berlin scene that gathered in occupied and peripheral spaces along the border is the one to which we owe the beats of techno and the culture of the night. Everything in this story is viscerally connected.

Relaunched in 2013 Berlin Atonal in now a biennial festival recognized as a platform for the presentation of new and boundary-challenging artistic work, with a particular emphasis on contemporary developments in sound, electronic music, and hybrid artistic forms. It operates outside the usual categories, establishing a format that is deliberately indeterminate: an assembly of artistic situations that would not easily find a home elsewhere. The meeting point between Berlin Atonal of the past and the present is a place: Kraftwerk, a power plant from 1962, recovered and refurbished thanks to the effort of Dimitri Hegemann – founder of the festival – who had the ambitious idea of giving back this segment to the city, fostering community, culture, experimentation and curiosity. It had already worked once, in the 1980s, when empty spaces were taken over with the pragmatic ambition of creating open communities where people had place to interact and create something unique and different from the fragmented and controlled social environment they had to navigate. When subjected to high pressure the density of water increases and so its form — that’s how they were while creating their own organizational systems choosing the right spaces, making them visible and recognizable and transforming them in places with disruptive identities. Until the early 2000s, Berlin was full of low-cost, run-down, inherited, empty spaces, filled in improvised ways. The effect this had on the city’s economy is well known: on one hand, available apartments were bought up as a form of investment, and on the other, major corporations quickly moved in, filling the voids left by both hot and cold wars, with new, elitist buildings in just a few years. Almost overnight, a city often regarded as problematic and even ugly became a desirable and sexy place—while still retaining a toxic charm. Characteristics that, by transitive property, are also attributed to those who live there romanticized by certain gazes and western niche cultures.

This growth, even in vast and free Berlin, as in all major European cities, has led to the inevitable rise in the cost of living—a dynamic which, in Germany’s poorest city, was not easily assimilated by its citizens, long accustomed to viewing space as a necessary, accessible, and shareable good. And about this last thing let’s remember that one of the most important musical projects presented during the first Berlin Atonal—if not the most important and influential of all—had already taken this situation into account. They choose to call themselves Collapsing New Buildings. But in German, darkly joking.

Die Stille Kathedrale
Up until ten days before Berlin Atonal began, this same space hosted the installation The Quiet Space: no performance, no music, no images. Only the chance to move through the enormous emptiness, to be immersed in a silence so full it becomes almost deafening. Every step echoed against the concrete, a reminder of how Germany can make fear and introspection tangible. Another reflection of the German Angst—but here, solitude is not only mental: it is concrete, material, seeping into the bodies that traverse the shadows and silence of the place. Kraftwerk It is so much than a building. It is an experiential space that is itself the embodiment of the festival. A vessel containing the poem; light, color, image, (a)rythm and sound joined together in an organic synesthesis. Dynamic and impressive, in the way people today imagine the future would look. What we refer to as post-industrial. Hyper-industrial. Surrounded by walls and columns designed with mathematical precision relatable to the original function itself, the speakers are used to diffuse the ultimate audio experience in each corner, lights are activated to transform – again – the spatial perception. Perceived and recognized as cathedral by many, inside it’s impossible to separate the body from the sound. The space declares itself as more than architecture. It instructs, disciplines, seduces. Sound is not entertainment but an occupation of the body, a reordering of sense and will. The walls, concrete and unyielding, carry the history of other gatherings, other releases, other abandonments. The crowd stands not as audience but as congregation, bound in mutual anticipation. The darkness enforces equality—no one shines, all are absorbed into the same field of vibration. Low frequencies arrive like an intrusion, intimate and invasive, making organs quiver and thought scatter. What is worshipped here is not divinity but intensity, the possibility of self-dissolving into pulse. A ritual both liberating and exacting bodies offered, sound received, identity briefly undone.